There must
be something in the psychology departments deep in the
fever swamps that could cast light on the proclivity of
some to go right ahead and blame the victim. Guilty of
it myself, when something like a hurricane hits
somewhere like Florida. A jumble deep inside us some
might claim, possibly along the lines of that feeble
excuse "It must be hardwired into us, we just can't help
ourselves." The more eccentric of us might hold the view
that those prone to blaming the victim like nothing
better than to define themselves as victims and by so
doing find reasons for their own disgraceful lack of
anything like the couth that's been developed over the
generations to inhibit those passions that result in
Baboon or possibly Muskrat type behaviors. I think it
was Max Weber who after a lifetime of attempting to
unearth rationality in our species just gave up,
shrugged his shoulders and suggested that we people do
not succumb to rational analysis. Weber died in Munich
in 1920, he was one of the founding father's of
sociology, and possibly the most boring person who ever
lived, right up there with the School of American
Functionalists whose lack of imagination defies
description in its absolute dedication to the
destruction of all hope that resulted in Management
Studies, or How to Maintain Servitude as it's been
called.

Those who
might have spent time with sociology may have preferred
to come away with the idea that the movements and habits
of social groups are best understood through those
practices observed within the disciplines of weather
forecasting. It's basically about the hard work of
accurately measuring thousands and thousands of
patterns. A little flutter in this pattern, a growl of
two in that pattern and soon enough there's a prediction
for straight line winds flattening buildings in Kansas.
It's the sort of rough and tumble that challenges the
bold. It's also true that when theory falls the other
side of a growl and the wrong side of a flutter
forecasting of any kind can become very tricky business
indeed. But necessary in understanding is to maintain as
accurate a grasp of ourselves as we possible can,
certainly there'll be a thousand often lazy fictions,
such as individualism and freedom, within that
understanding and many errors but when you know it's a
fiction and find reasons to nonetheless persist, it
becomes kind of a desperately unstable and depressing
pattern, and here we're talking 98.5% chance of the wind
flattened buildings in Kansas being swallowed by ground
splitting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. So we've
all got that to look forward to on November 6th of this
year. Which is the day after Guy Fawkes day, a man whose
cultural disagreements were such he joined a plot to
blow up the English Parliament, he was hanged on the
last day of January 1606.